


Immersion Therapy

by Nimgrade



Category: Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Flashbacks, Fluff, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Other, Overcoming fears, San Francisco tourism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-09
Updated: 2018-11-09
Packaged: 2019-08-21 06:02:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16571018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nimgrade/pseuds/Nimgrade
Summary: In the aftermath of the battle against Drake and Riot, Eddie discovers that immersion in water activates a specific fear in him. He and Venom take a field trip in hopes of overcoming it.





	Immersion Therapy

Their new apartment has, among other, far more exciting features, a combined shower and bathtub. A great improvement over the too-narrow shower stall in Eddie’s old place, but he doesn’t give it much thought at first. His last proper bath was ages ago, probably back when he was a little kid, and isn’t California still in a drought? But the option appeals to both of them. Venom loves soaking up warm water—unsurprisingly, as they're basically one giant bundle of muscle fibers—and after so many nights of running high on adrenaline and phenethylamine, they both deserve a quieter indulgence.

Eddie takes a quick shower first, just to scrub the grime of the city off their skin, before plugging the drain and filling up the bathtub. Venom sighs and flexes happily in his veins as they sink into the water.

But he barely has a chance to enjoy the warmth before an odd discomfort lodges in his throat and expands outward, quickening his pulse. Eddie opens his mouth to ask Venom what’s going on but chokes on his words as the flashback slams into him, as violently as the water knocked the air out of his lungs from below in the fall from Drake’s rocket. Exactly as before, he fights to keep his head above the surface as flaming shrapnel rains down and churns the water. Gasping; flailing; fumes clouding his head and saltwater burning his lungs; the water viscous and heavy in his clothes like the body of a massive symbiote trying to force _him_ inside instead of the other way around, and in turn he’s empty, he’s lost, _he has lost Venom_.

Since that night this scene has played out in his dreams repeatedly, but now with the genuine sense of immersion his body is telling him that it’s real, it’s happening again—

Venom shoots out from Eddie’s shoulders to grip the sides of the tub and yank him upright, just as they do to pull him out of a nightmare. Eddie clambers out of the water, splashing it over the sides, trailing wet tendrils for a moment as he drapes a towel around them and huddles on the floor. Venom’s grip thickens and tightens around his shoulders in an attempt to quell their shaking.

**_We are safe, Eddie._ **

It takes a few minutes to convince his brain and his racing heart that the danger is past, but eventually they stop shivering and stand up. Eddie drains the tub, watching all those gallons of water go to waste.

So much for a relaxing night in.

 

Every new minor trigger he discovers—from hospital gowns to seafood tanks to a particular square of empty pavement outside Mrs. Chen’s store—is a source of annoyance and shame (and additional shame at feeling ashamed), but most of these evoke only a stab of deep unease as his heart pounds and blood drains from his face. His reaction to being immersed in water is the most dramatic by far. Though Eddie knows it’s an unhealthy outlook, he can’t help but think that their newfound strength and power are reduced, diluted, by his own psychological weakness. Venom rumbles their dissent and comforts Eddie after each brief episode, but the unfounded suspicion stays with him.

Eddie’s first idea for overcoming his fear of the water is equally ill-advised: attempting to jump down into the San Francisco Bay from the edge of Rincon Park while wearing Venom as a wetsuit. He doesn’t make it to the point of suiting up, doesn’t even make it over the stone barrier; he just stares down into the water, mesmerized and sickened by the unfriendly, almost pockmarked look of it, until Venom gently suggests that they try this another time.

 

Talking later with Anne (who reminds them that she is not their therapist, and that she has already given them the names and numbers of several actual licensed therapists), they cobble together a three-step exposure program. First, Eddie and Venom will spend some time along the waterfront—looking down into the bay, seeing and hearing and smelling the water—until they can perceive it as a neutral force of nature with no malicious intentions, but with the capacity for both creation and destruction, power and delicacy. Next, they’ll get used to immersing themselves in some amount of water, so they can take a goddamn relaxing bath.

“And then, if you absolutely insist on jumping off a pier to go swimming in the bay—at nighttime in late autumn, I might add—go right ahead. Though for the life of me I can’t figure out why you’d want that.”

Eddie shrugs one shoulder. “Need to prove to ourselves that the water hasn’t got the better of us.”

Anne sighs and shakes her head. “I hope you know that having experienced trauma doesn’t make you a weaker person,” she says, her words and stern gaze directed at Eddie alone.

“I know,” he tells her, and tries to believe it. “Thank you, Annie.”

“You’re welcome. Go to therapy.”

 

It’s a perfect day for a stroll down the piers.

When Eddie first moved to San Francisco, he adamantly refused to do anything touristy. He was opposed to it on principle. It was one thing if investigating or shooting a story happened to bring him to a scenic location; it was quite a different endeavor to leave his apartment with the intention of sightseeing. After his first full year in the city, he relented a bit, taking the occasional day trip around Chinatown or the Castro or the Presidio—but never dreaming of pulling out his phone to take a photo.

So he supposes this won’t be so bad. In a way, Venom is a tourist, albeit a permanent one: on this planet, in this city, in Eddie’s body. The symbiote deserves as many new experiences as possible, and while plenty of those can be found in the comfort of their own home and immediate neighborhood, others require a bit more legwork.

The midday sky is mildly overcast as they approach the Embarcadero. Vendors crowd the park with tables and booths full of of prints, knitted hats, leather jewelry, artisanal soaps, and every other manner of handmade items. Less than twenty-four hours from now, the farmers’ market will set up shop across the plaza, but for the moment there’s nothing edible to sample, and they move between the tents with interest but no desire to buy.

They cross the street to the Ferry Building and start to walk. A steady procession of joggers (and the odd rollerblader) along the wide pavement reassures Eddie that not _everyone_ here is a tourist.

Looking toward the various high-rises of downtown, they catch sight of some interesting architecture among the more featureless skyscrapers: a few thin spires, the building with the inescapably ugly US Bank logo slapped along its top edges, and a couple of oddly narrow rectangles built in staggered layers that look like enormous decks of cards being cut and shuffled. A few blocks later Coit Tower comes into view, a stately cylinder rising out of sprays of hilltop foliage.

Venom tilts their head back. **_Eddie!_ _Must be a great view from that tower. We should climb up some time._**

“A lot of people do. Just… from the inside. Using stairs.” Early in Eddie’s relationship with Anne, she suggested a date at the tower, but his acrophobia interfered. Even now he’s not sure he could manage the climb. Merging fully with Venom suppresses his fear in the moment, but it still lingers in his human mind and body. Apparently he’s fated to be a creature of the earth, not of the air or water.

**_We will work on that._ **

He nods. They start to venture out onto the piers, either leaning over the railings to watch the water sloshing directly below or just letting their gaze skim across its surface toward the other end of the bay. Eddie’s discomfort builds and refuses to let up even when he turns away.

Without his input, his hand slips into his jacket pocket; a moment later a few tendrils extend out of Eddie’s palm to interlace with his fingers. **_What are you afraid of?_** Venom asks in a tone as gentle as the touch.

He’s been struggling to articulate just that. Of course there’s no danger of falling in by accident, and even if they did the symbiote would pull them out easily, though perhaps not inconspicuously. As Eddie stares down into the water a far more irrational fear, lent some clarity by the previous nightmares and flashbacks, now comes into sharper focus, as if he is peering beneath the undulating surface to some submerged truth. It seems to him that any contact with the water will snap him right back to that moment of shock and separation, of gasping for air and grasping for the piece of him that is suddenly missing and might never be found. Soaked and weighted down, Eddie never actually felt Venom return to him, didn’t realize he was whole again until foreign appendages dragged his body ashore. In retrospect, that momentary lack of awareness scares him more than anything else. Not only with the suggestion that their bond was weakened in some way as Venom burned, but also with the sense memory of the water as one immense, unthinking symbiote drowning him within its contours, pressing in around every part of his body in a way that crowded out even the feeling of his dual selfhood being restored.

**_So… you fear not just losing me, but losing all sense of me within you._ **

_I guess so_ , he thinks, following a series of ripples as it approaches the pier.

Venom’s response sounds pained. _**Eddie… you have nothing to be afraid of. Our bond is so much stronger now. Almost nothing could force a separation, and even if something did, you would still feel my presence, far more strongly even than I felt you that night in the water.**_

He closes his eyes. “And what would you feel?”

**_I would sense nothing but the path back to you._ **

Eddie looks back across the water, swallowing hard and blinking back tears. “That’s good to know, love. That’s really good to know.”

They walk down a few more piers, watching the angle of the hills on the opposite shore change ever so slightly from each lookout point. Eddie feels a resurgence of agitation whenever they approach the water, but just as consistently, the warm reassurance of Venom’s words and the comforting weight of the symbiote curled up in his chest help to chase it away. Along the main path, they pass various upscale restaurants, a science museum, and a kiosk advertising tours of Alcatraz before a pair of freestanding flags announces their arrival at Pier 39.

Faint music reaches them from the row of shops a block away, but there’s one more view of the bay to take in. They step up to the knobbled wood of the platform and look out. A forest of ship masts, surprisingly tall for such small vessels, sways with the gentle waves, and innumerable lines of rigging criss-cross the bright gray sky and low hills. And again, as Eddie watches the water flow between thick wooden docking posts, their lower halves permanently darkened by dampness, the same redundant fears creep up on him.

Venom breaks the silence before his discomfort can advance too far. **_Want to try something. Hold out our hands._**

He glances behind them to make sure they’re alone and then complies, extending his arms over the wooden rail.

**_Imagine we’re reaching out to touch the water._ **

Suddenly there is wetness lapping at his hands. Eddie starts, but the rippling sensation is just Venom, a little more liquefied than usual, dipping and flowing across the surface of the skin on his palms and fingertips. He turns his hands skyward, and it’s as if the “water” is defying gravity. “That feels… extremely accurate.”

**_Good. Now, lower our hands into the water._ **

As Eddie mimes the action, the symbiote’s mass flows up to his wrists, looking less like fitted gloves and more like a pair of enormous, quivering black water droplets. When he closes his eyes (after checking once more for onlookers), it really feels as though his hands are submerged. But at the same time, the sensation unmistakably originates from within his own body.

Still… “It’s not exactly the same,” he says. “Maybe if I could feel the real water, too…”

In response, the blackness disappears from his right hand, and the mass around his left hand drips downward, thinning out with gravity, until a few threadlike inches are submerged. Eddie concentrates hard, projecting his sensory awareness out through Venom’s extremities, and can just feel the water surrounding the symbiote. There’s a faint but definite distinction between what does and doesn’t belong to him.

“Huh,” Eddie says softly.

**_So you see. There is nothing to fear. We will not lose our sense of one another._ **

He manages a small smile, and whispers, “Thank you.”

The blackness retracts into his skin, and the residual gray patches fade just as quickly. Eddie feels a warm embrace from within his ribcage. He sighs the tension away as they leave the water and step from wood back to asphalt.

“Well,” says Eddie, “This has been a productive hour for both of us. I didn’t know things would get so emotionally heavy, but I did prepare a little surprise for you.”

**_Oh yes_** , Venom says gleefully, **_I already know what it is_.**

“Really? Damn, I thought I did a better job of concealing my thoughts this time.”

**_Hardly. But I will still act surprised_.**

Eddie rolls his eyes and starts for the tourist-crowded section of Pier 39. A carnivalesque atmosphere takes hold, live music from a saxophonist at the pier entrance fading into speaker-piped pop songs themselves overpowered at times by bursts of conversation and laughter from the tourists in their path. Eddie allows himself to relax and take it all in: signs advertising crepes, chowder, and mini doughnuts; shops selling art, scents, and jewelry; further down the pier, an arcade and merry-go-round—and that’s not even counting the upper level of mostly restaurants. But there’s one store in particular that they’re here for, and Venom does not need to feign surprise for Eddie to feel their sheer delight at seeing the words “Chocolate Heaven.”

They step inside and into a world of chocolate bars, truffles, cocoa mixes, fudges, caramels… chocolate in every shape from coins to rocks to presidential busts, crowding the walls and spilling out of barrels in the aisles.

“Okay,” Eddie says under his breath, beginning to salivate from Venom’s speechless choco-lust, “budget is fifty dollars—” this is a special occasion calling for generosity and some sacrifices down the line— “and the only rule is no explicitly touristy bullshit.”

**_What would that look like?_** Venom asks in a captivated tone as they move further into the store.

“Oh, let’s see…” Eddie lights on a few examples just glancing around them. “Any packages shaped like cable cars or the Golden Gate Bridge are out. As is anything with the words ‘I love SF’ on it.”

**_Like those?_ **

He feels his eyes refocus on an object next to the wall: a rotating display of small personalized keychains. Indeed, each proclaims a love of San Francisco on behalf of a name spelled out underneath in license-plate capitals.

“Yes,” Eddie says, stepping around to the other side of the display and out of view of the customers and cashiers at the front of the store, “these are a prime example of touristy bullshit. And also a flawed concept in general, I think. No one actually wants to carry around trinkets with their own name on them. It feels egocentric. I guess the idea is to buy them as gifts for your friends, but then you’re saddling _them_ with that responsibility—”

**_Do they have every name? Your name?_ **

“I doubt it. At most they’d have Edward—nope, not even that,” he says, scanning the row of E’s. He spins the display to a further point in the alphabet. “And the only V’s left are Victor and Veronica. Not that they would have your name to begin with.”

**_Oh! Eddie, I see yours down at the bottom!_ **

“Huh, really?” He crouches down as Venom draws his arm forward. “Are they out of ord—oh, for fuck’s sake.”

The tiny tendril extending from his wrist toys with a keychain that reads “DRAMA QUEEN”.

“If anything, that’s yours,” he huffs, as Venom’s amusement rolls through him.

**_This one, then?_ **

The next keychain spells out “CUTIE”.

“I’m flattered, but I don’t think either of us can claim that title. That one even less so,” he says to “100% WOMAN”.

**_Well, how about this?_ **

The keychain at the end of the row says “I LOVE YOU”, with a solid heart symbol standing in for the word “love”.

He rolls his eyes but can’t keep the grin from consuming his face. “Yeah, okay, I’ll accept that. I heart you too.”

**_Say it properly, Eddie._ **

“I _love_ you too. And I’m grateful for everything you’ve done for me today.” A pulse of affection from Venom travels down his spine as he stands. “Now, what do you say we stock up on some chocolate?”

 

Two weeks later, the gourmet chocolate stash long since consumed, Eddie and Venom return to the Embarcadero. They don’t walk as far this time, just to Pier 5 and the public promenade that’s nearly empty even at this early hour of the night. The combined glow of streetlamps, building lights, and the illuminated suspension cables on the Bay Bridge splashes light across the water. Even so, the bay looks nearly as sinister and alive to Eddie as it did when lit by a flaming sky. They’ve been rehearsing for this moment at home, settling into a deeper and colder bath every few days, but there’s still no comparison. They could dye the bathwater black and whip it up with an eggbeater, and it would be little more than a sloppy kindergarten diorama compared to the real thing.

Infected by his apprehension, Venom stirs within his chest. **_Eddie, let’s wait. We can work up to this further_.**

“No… I don’t want to keep coming back. I want to do this tonight.”

He walks out a little more than halfway along the wooden promenade and sits down on a bench, pulling off his sweatshirt and storing it underneath the seat. The night air is just warm enough. All that remains is to wait for a lull in the foot traffic.

This takes only about five minutes, but it’s enough time for his anxiety to ramp up. At a nudge from Venom, he interlocks his fingers behind his neck, giving the symbiote cover to peek out between the vertebrae and stroke through the hair at his nape.

**_We are fine. We are together._ **

He curls one finger down in response and feels a tendril wrap around it.

Finally, the couple closest to them strolls back toward the road. A solitary person remains at the end of the promenade, but they’re sitting on a bench facing in the opposite direction. It’s time.

Eddie takes a deep breath and stands. No room for doubt or hesitation. The railing is at hip height; he hoists himself over it easily and bends down, gripping the bars. Venom flows out and over his whole body. There’s a moment of darkness, an extra-long blink, and at the end of it he sees through different eyes.

_Into the water_ , they think.

They dangle from the edge of the pier, then drop.

Eddie stiffens in preparation for the remembered impact, but from a fall of no more than a couple feet, the water swallows them soundlessly. He readies himself as well for a tide of panic that never comes, because immediately, nearly everything is different from that terrible night. The symbiote presses close enough to Eddie’s skin to both insulate him from the cold and express the tightening of their bond since their last separation. The water is calm, but even if it were as choppy and antagonistic as before, they would be all right. Venom will not let him drown.

They surface for air every half minute, close to the wooden foundation of the pier so as not to be spotted, but spend the time in between fully submerged, jetting and rolling through the water in delight that obviously originates from the symbiote but is ultimately Eddie’s as well. And that makes all the difference. With every motion, as the water buoys or resists or pulls at or parts for them, Eddie feels Venom in and around him. They feel and move and react as one, perfectly in sync, their combined form distinct from and assertive over the medium that surrounds it.

Finally, they lie on their back, drifting along between the sea and the sky, looking out among the scattering of stars visible through the urban light pollution. Eddie thinks about alien worlds, and the vast swaths of space between them.

_It’s funny…_ he begins.

**_What?_ **

_Well, it’s kind of a cliché for humans to look up at the stars and philosophize about our place in the universe, wonder if we’re entirely alone as intelligent beings in our galaxy, that sort of thing. It’s a pretty common source of existential terror. I never really worried about much beyond the planetary scale, but… looks like I’m completely safe from that line of thinking now, right? Now that I know we’re not alone, and now that_ I’m _not alone._

**_Yes. Safe._** Eddie feels Venom press even tighter around him. **_Whole_.**

_I guess your species never dealt with those fears,_ he muses, as tenderness washes over him. _Once you’ve been to so many worlds, and come in contact with so many different aliens… seems like you would lose all context for feeling that way._

Their body quakes suddenly with emotion. **_Feeling lost?_** Venom says. **_Feeling exposed and alone in the world? Feeling inconsequential and powerless? Those feelings?_**

Flashes of memory laced with desperation and despair fly at Eddie in time with Venom’s words, which are impassioned but not angry, or at least not at him. Eddie finds his internal eyes and closes them in understanding. _You felt that way every time we were torn apart._

**_Yes_** , Venom says. ** _But never again._**

_Because of what you said last time, right? About having a stronger sense of each other?_

Venom clasps their hands together over their heart. **_As long as I have you, Eddie, and you have me, we will never be lost. We will always perceive each other apart from the rest of the world, and we will always come back together as one._**

Love radiates throughout their body, warming them from within as they float. Fully enveloped in Venom’s touch, Eddie feels at peace. There will likely still be nightmares and anxieties, but this one fear is vanquished for good. The pressures of the outside world can only bring the two of them into sharper relief to one another.

Back on dry land, Venom expels any water that doesn’t slide effortlessly off their surface and nestles back inside Eddie’s chest. They wear a huge smile and exchange wordless expressions of love all the way back home, where they can’t wait to sink into a warm bath.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed this tourism guide that I cobbled together on a detour home from work one night. Every one of those keychains is real and for sale in Chocolate Heaven on Pier 39.
> 
> Disclaimer: I have not personally experienced PTSD, so this may not be an accurate depiction of dealing with or overcoming trauma. Please consult a trusted mental health professional for advice on actual exposure therapy.
> 
> Thank you to [aretia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aretia/pseuds/aretia) for beta-reading!


End file.
